Divination - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  A screaming face looked up at them, its eyes pools of fire, its lips charring, its hair a swirl of flame and smoke.

  ‘The prophet,’ he said softly. Frost was forming in the air and falling around them. ‘Now let us begin.’

  Idris raised her head. A cold, high ringing filled her ears. Breath hissed from her lungs. The pillared chamber was still there, but there was something wrong. She turned and looked back to the stairs; the light falling from them was a frozen flicker of lightning and fire seen through a haze of dust. Argento stood on the steps, facing up towards the light. His foot was frozen between steps. Closer to her, Covenant stood next to a pillar, his bolt pistol braced in both hands. The bolt that he had just fired sat at the end of a spear of flame a metre beyond the muzzle. The dead guards stood in the glow of the bolt’s muzzle fire, their faces slack, blood frozen on their off-white robes.

  Idris felt a cold knot pull tight in her gut.

  ‘What–’

  ‘Why will you not leave me alone?’

  Idris turned.

  Where there had been darkness at the far end of the chamber, now there was light. A young man sat on a raised platform, legs folded beneath him. Black robes hung from his narrow shoulders. Tiny brass cogs had been stitched to the cloth, so that he was scaled in shining wheels. His scalp was clean-shaved, his skin dusted with silver powder, his eyes ringed with blue pigment. Golden light flowed over him, though there was no sign of a candle or flame. He looked at Idris. A slight tremble ran through his lip. He looked regal, and terrifying, and fragile.

  ‘Go away!’ shouted the youth, and his voice was high, and shrill, and filled with terror. The pillars shook. Sound roared back into being for a second. The dead guards juddered towards Covenant. The bolt speared towards them and struck one in the chest. Blood and bone and shrapnel exploded from its chest… and froze.

  This is not your place, child,+ said a voice in her skull that was louder than a mountain fall, colder than the void. Idris felt herself crumple under the pressure of the words.

  The boy’s eyes flicked from molten gold to frightened human eyes, the stillness of his face to panic.

  The world crashed back into motion with a roar of explosion. Covenant’s bolt exploded in the skull of the dead guard. Argento leapt down the last few steps.

  ‘We must secure the saint,’ he gasped. Idris took a step towards the boy on the dais.

  No! No! I don’t, I won’t!+ The youth tilted back his head, and his scream ripped through the air in a burning wave. Idris had time to turn her head and raise her arms and feel her skin prickle as it began to burn. She felt fire pour into her mind. It blazed through her carefully conditioned defences, and flowed through her thoughts like a flood tide. Her thoughts and flesh burned.

  And the moment she knew she was going to die, it stopped. She felt the presence in her skull change, as though it had found something other than what it was expecting.

  Look…+ said the voice that held none of the boy’s fear, but strength like nothing she had ever touched. +Look at what seed this tree grew from.+

  In a frozen instant she saw the life of the boy. She saw him running through the alleys of the Hill of Brass, laughing, his friends at his heels. She saw him hunched over a workbench, fumbling with a novice’s tools as he tried to cut the teeth and spokes in a cog wheel the size of a fingertip. She saw the tears, and pain that followed his failure to become apprentice to one of the guilds. She saw the shame in his mother’s eyes as she turned away from him. She saw him begin to make patterns with the broken cogs he swept from beneath the benches of the other apprentices. He saw things in the meshing of the tiny wheels: things that had not happened, things that made no sense. A priest from the Temple of Plenty noticed. She was with him as he found himself kept in the dark, chained to cold stone. There was pain. They fed him strange food and stranger drink.

  The world he saw fell apart. Sometimes he was sitting on cushions with people kneeling before him asking questions. Sometimes he was walking through a desert in which cities rose and fell with every step. Sometimes he was looking out across armies as they marched into a curtain of flame and smoke. Sometimes he was a scrap of flesh, slowly rotting at the heart of a failing machine, feeling only pain, and knowing that when the pain ended he had failed.

  Idris saw and felt, and did not know what it was that she saw. It was too huge, too small, too powerful, and too weak. It was not what she had expected. She had come here expecting terror and divinity, and she had found misery.

  I…+ she said with all her will. +I am sorry.+

  I cannot go on…+

  You don’t need to.+

  The vision fell away from her eyes. The fire wave vanished. Idris leapt forwards. The young man on the dais turned his silver-dusted face to look at her. His pupils were sharp. A tear rolled out of the corner of his eye, dragging blue and silver pigment down his cheek.

  She brought up her hand, and the dart thrower on her wrist released. The boy flinched. He looked down. The fins of a cold iron dart projected from his chest. He coughed. Blood glossed his lips.

  Thank you,+ said a voice in her skull. +Thank you, Idris.+

  He slumped forwards. The chamber became dark. The world was suddenly quiet, both inside her skull and around her.

  A stab-light cut through the gloom behind her. Argento and Covenant ran to her side, shining light down on the body on the dais.

  ‘We were supposed to take it alive,’ said Covenant.

  ‘No,’ said Argento, his voice low. ‘No, the power flowing through this soul was uncontrollable. It would have killed us. I made a…’ He paused, staring at the corpse for a long moment. ‘I made a miscalculation. The boundary between divinity and abomination is thin, and most potentials are balanced on its edge. It must have sensed our presence and its fear must have unbalanced what control it did have. No, Idris was right to end it.’

  He looked at her, and gave a nod.

  Idris felt her mouth open to say what she had seen intertwined in the boy’s pain: the sights and sensations so vast and strange that they lingered in the root of her mind like a burn.

  ‘I…’ she began to say. ‘I saw…’

  ‘I know,’ said Argento, nodding slowly, and holding her gaze. ‘Today you touched the edge of divinity searching for a way back into the world. This is what we are seeking. Remember it, Idris. Always.’

  She nodded, and was thankful when Argento turned away and moved towards the steps up into the world above.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We have to be gone.’

  Idris moved to follow, and then paused, looking back at the slumped figure on the dais. Blood was soaking into the cushions beneath it. She sensed Covenant pause beside her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘It said it couldn’t go on,’ she said. ‘I heard it inside my mind.’

  ‘It is at peace now,’ said Covenant.

  She started to nod, but then shook her head.

  ‘That is the thing,’ she said. ‘There was more than one voice speaking to me – the boy and something… someone else… and I am not sure which one spoke.’

  She looked at Covenant, but he did not reply, only held her gaze for a long instant, face carved in shadow by the glare of the stablight in his hand, and then moved towards the stairs. A second later Idris began to walk in the same direction, and only looked back once.

  About the Author

  John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes
and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

  An extract from Rites of Passage.

  They were forty-seven hours out of Necromunda when the warp shock took hold.

  Chettamandey Vula Brobantis jerked awake from cloying dreams of roaring giants and blood-flecked axes as the Solarox shuddered violently, the entire starship spasming like some mighty aquatic beast impaled by a hunter’s harpoon. She rolled to her right, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, and reached out with her left hand to slap the lumens on. Pale light sprang up at the gesture, as torches held aloft by bronze images of Terran saints illuminated her private chambers. The rays glinted dully off the gilded surfaces of her dressing table – built of wood from a planet liberated from the savage aeldari – reflected from the gilt-edged mirror presented to her as a gift by Admiral Venuza of the 19th Pacificum Sector Fleet, and got tangled in the folds of black Azantian lace that hung around her huge, pillar-cornered bed. The bed that until a matter of days ago, she’d shared with her husband of forty-three Terran years.

  But then there had been that unpleasantness with the rogue House Goliath pit fighter on Necromunda, and the life-voyage of Azariel, Novator of Navigator House Brobantis, had been abruptly and quite dramatically truncated, courtesy of an extremely large edged weapon. Chetta actually missed him a little, despite the fact that she’d orchestrated the whole thing. She’d had to kill the fighter concerned to ensure her involvement didn’t come to light, but no one seemed to doubt that she’d opened her warp eye and blasted his mind into fragments in self-defence.

  Well, it had been self-defence, after a fashion. There was no question that Chetta would have died, if he’d been allowed to live and had suffered from loose lips.

  The Solarox bucked again, and Chetta frowned. The Navigator for this segment of the voyage was Vora, a scion of one of the minor branches of House Brobantis. He wasn’t scintillating conversation, but he was highly competent at the business of guiding starships through the screaming, roiling mass of malignant energy that constituted the warp, else he’d have never been selected to pilot his Novator’s personal ship. For the Solarox to be acting like this either meant that Vora had steered them extremely carelessly into a warp storm an order of magnitude worse than any Chetta had ever experienced first-hand, or…

  She keyed her bedside vox-set. ‘Captain Arqueba.’

  There was nothing but the faintest of crackles of an open line for a few seconds, and then Anja Arqueba’s voice replied.

  ‘Lady Chettamandey.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Chetta demanded bluntly. ‘I haven’t been tossed around this badly since taking fire from an ork cruiser in Tennyson’s Reach.’

  ‘We’re… not certain, my lady.’ Anja’s voice was as clipped and professional as always, but Chetta had known her for over a decade, and could hear the tension in it. ‘We’re still in the warp, and the Geller field is holding, but we’ve lost all communication with Lord Vora. We’re steering blind.’

  Chetta swore, and rolled out of bed. ‘Have you got a reading on his vitals?’

  ‘No, my lady. As I said, we’ve lost all communication.’

  ‘Either that, or the links are working just fine, and he’s dead.’ Chetta sighed, running through the possible scenarios in her mind. The ravages of the empyrean could scour a Navigator’s skull clean of sanity, but one of her kind actually dropping dead mid-voyage was less common, although not unheard of. Heart failure, perhaps? Or possibly a fit, or some other madness that had caused him to tear himself from his throne and the machines that monitored him? ‘I’m heading up there. Prepare a team.’

  There was of course one other possibility: that something unholy had manifested out of the shifting currents of the warp and was even now eating Vora’s soul. It was unlikely, but possible. However, leaving the ship blind in the immaterium was as good as a death sentence for everyone on board anyway. Chetta had calculated the mathematics of risk in her head and come to the same conclusion that she had so many times in the past.

  If you wanted something done right, it was best to do it yourself.

  ‘Yes, my lady,’ Anja acknowledged her, and that was an end to the conversation. Chetta shrugged her way into a heavy robe and belted it securely, then eased on the diamond-encrusted slippers Azariel had gifted her for their tenth wedding anniversary.

  The Solarox rocked again, and spilled Chetta sideways into her dressing table. She steadied herself on it, wincing at the jolt to her knee and ankle joints, and made a mental note to dispose of it as soon as she could get away with doing so. Collecting relics linked to the aeldari had been one of her husband’s few real vices, and the damned things made her decidedly uncomfortable.

  The next jolt nearly sent Chetta tumbling backwards onto her bed again. She gritted her teeth, and took up her cane of blackened tachydon ivory from its resting place. She needed it some days more than others, but she’d be damned if she was going to try to make her way through a warp-tossed starship without it.

  ‘I cannot,’ she muttered, stumping towards her cabin door, ‘be having with this foolishness.’

  The Solarox was not a large ship by the standards of the Imperial Navy vessels Chetta had served on, but nor was it a tug. Even using the express elevators, it took her several minutes to get to the forecastle, by which point her joints were protesting bitterly and her mood had worsened significantly. She’d been met along the way by the team Captain Arqueba had assembled at her instruction: a dozen Brobantis armsmen and women in midnight carapace, armed with suppression shields and combat shotguns. Thus flanked, Chetta approached the Navigator’s chamber: a heavily shielded, ingrowing barnacle in the ship’s structure, its external walls encrusted with pipes and power cables, and dotted here and there with readouts attended to by the Solarox’s crimson-robed tech-adepts. One of them looked up at the tap-tap-tapping of Chetta’s steel-shod cane on the deck.

  ‘High lady,’ the adept buzzed in greeting through the voice-synth that had replaced their vocal cords. It was an alteration most likely made by choice rather than necessity, but Chetta didn’t regard the Adeptus Mechanicus’ habit of replacing their body parts with machines with the same distrust or disgust as many humans did. There were many days when she’d have given her right hand for artificial hips, knees and ankles, but for the moment she was still stubbornly determined to stick with her natural body, despite her regular disagreements with it.

  Besides, Chetta knew well what it was like to be regarded as a disgusting aberration. Navigators might be essential to the functioning of the Imperium, but that didn’t prevent the ill-informed and overly superstitious from regarding her and her kin as heretical mutants, rather than the finely tuned results of countless centuries of jealously guarded gene-lore.

  ‘What is the Navigator’s status?’ she asked, eyeing the chamber warily. The walls weren’t coated in frost, which was something – the very worst manifestations of the warp tended to drop the local temperature to something approaching a Valhallan summer.

  ‘Insufficient data to be certain,’ the adept replied simply.

  ‘Your best estimate?’ Chetta said. She’d learned long ago never to use the word ‘guess’ around the initiates of the Martian priesthood, since it tended to upset them.

  ‘There are no indications of abnormal atmospheric conditions within the chamber,’ the adept told her. ‘Readouts suggest a steady temperature of nineteen point two five degrees Celsius, with humidity at thirty-two per cent. However, we have no readings for pulse, respiration or brain activity. The probability of these monitoring mechanisms all failing at once while others are unaffected is approximately seven per cent. Ergo, I believe it is reasonable to assume that Lord Vora has expired.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ Chetta muttered. ‘The viewing shields?’

  ‘Still open, high lady.’

  ‘Whatever happened must have happened fast, then,’ Chetta said
, more for the benefit of the others around her than anything else. She looked sideways at the sergeant and pointed at the outer blast door in front of them. It appeared ludicrously solid, but it wasn’t a Navigator’s frail frame that it was intended to contain. ‘Remain here, and shoot anything that comes out of that door unless you’re absolutely certain that it’s me.’

  ‘And if we think it’s Lord Vora, high lady?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘Shoot it anyway,’ Chetta grunted, walking forwards. ‘It’s the only way to be sure.’ That had happened once, on one of her first voyages. Old Scara had ridden them through a warp storm, then when the time came to hand over to the next shift and he’d emerged from the chamber, something – some thing – made of torn flesh and jagged bone spurs had started to claw its way free from his skin. Three ratings had died before someone had managed to turn a heavy bolter on it, and even then it had nearly got to Chetta to open her throat with its teeth before it had finally been brought down.

  She barely thought about it, these days. She’d seen far worse inside the chamber.

  The first blast door slid aside and Chetta stepped through it, then gathered her robe around her as it slid shut behind her. She’d never yet had an item of clothing get caught, but it remained a tiny, irrational fear of hers, one that not even all her years of starfaring could shake.

  The blast door in front of her opened, and Chetta took a cautious step into the Navigator’s chamber.

  It wasn’t a large space, for a Navigator was required to do very little in there that involved any form of physical activity. It was dominated by the throne: an imposing seat of metal and animal leather, utilitarian yet menacing. Chetta absent-mindedly tugged her robe well clear of the closing second door and scanned the walls and ceiling. They were largely bare metal, and she could see nothing out of place there, no gibbering creature of malice and shadow waiting to spring the moment her attention was diverted. With that precaution taken, she stepped forwards cautiously to inspect the throne’s occupant.